Saturday, July 25, 2009

I am a constituent and I would like to know what are your plans fortackling the federal government's plans for instituting a mandatoryinternet filtering scheme, which would unnecessarily restrict thefreedoms of all of our citizens, without achieving its stated aim ofstopping child pornography.

I have many issues with the proposed plans:

I am a software engineer, and it is my professional opinion that the filtering scheme will not work.

It will only block a small subset of the ways that people communicate on the internet.

It will cause paedophiles to resort to more secretive ways of communicating and will therefore result in them being harder to catch.

It will restrict freedom of expression

The secret list of blocked sites, which has been leaked already, contains sites that have nothing to do with child pornography.

Some of the sites, such as anti-abortion sites andpro-euthanasia are clearly on the list for political reasons, whichleads to the assumption that sites could be blocked based on thepolitical belief of the party in power on any given day.

The majority of people, who will not know how to get around thefilters, will feel a chilling effect due to the possibility thatupsetting the wrong person will cause their site to be madeinaccessible to the public.

In the cases where sites are made inaccessible, it is blatant censorship.

How do you feel about each of the points raised here?

Where do you stand, in general, on the topic of human rights, andspecifically freedom of speech? Where do you draw the line? Most peopleagree that yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre should not be protected,due to the immediate harm it could cause. People vary on what hatespeech should be allowed. Others believe that anything controversial,or anything that disagrees with their personal beliefs should bebanned. What do you believe?

What are your core beliefs around the right to privacy? Some peoplebelieve that we should always have the right to be left alone, and thatonly with a court order, issued on the grounds of probable cause,should anyone from the government be able to infringe on that right.Others believe that any official should be trusted, no matter what, andthat they should be cooperated with, independent of whether they havecause for a given investigation. Where do you stand?

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying: "Those who would give upEssential Liberty to purchase a littleTemporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" and securityexpert Bruce Schneier often speaks about the concept of securitytheatre, which is where security procedures are put into place withoutregard for their effectiveness, in order to maintain an appearance ofsafety. An example of this is at one of the London airports I havetravelled through, there was a procedure where:

People put their belongings, excluding shoes, through the x-ray machine.

People collected their belongings

Some people were herded through to have their shoes x-rayed as well.

To most people, it would seem that this allows suspicious-lookingpeople to have extra screening in case something is hidden in theirshoes. In reality, however, anyone trying to do anything nefarious, whomight have been caught by having their shoes screened, would just takeanything bad out of their shoes and place it in their luggage at step 2.

How do you feel about security theatre? Are you happy enough for people to lose some freedoms, not be any safer, but feel safer, or would you oppose such measures?

If you think that airline security measures are reasonable, andconsidering that many aeroplanes hold no more than a crowded bus, andfar less than a train, would you ever consider instituting the samekind of screening on those modes of transport as exist on aeroplanes?

Do you believe that people have inalienable rights?

If so, what do you think they are?

I would like to know your opinions, and how you would vote on relatedissues, because I have not lived in this area during an election, and Iwould like to know whether your beliefs will conflict or align withmine, and therefore, whether or not I should vote for you at the nextelection.